Gamushara 2014.09.14 Review

Having a kouhaku-style red team versus white team battle is a favorite scheme, and they’re promising a genuine test of physical aptitude, but are the two teams really balanced?

The “power types” are quickly identified – Morohoshi-kun on the red team and Shintaro-kun on the white team, but what about the rest of the members?

Well, Morohoshi-kun had Matsumura Hokuto, Kyomoto Taiga, Takahashi Kaito, and Matsuda Genta with him. That seems on the face of it like a much more athletic team than Shintaro-kun’s cohort – Iwahashi Genki, Tanaka Juri, Hayashi Ren, and Takahashi Fuu. The red team is also older overall. Of course, Shintaro-kun himself is probably the strongest person present, but who’s the fastest or the most agile? I’m not sure.

The first battle is tug-of-war, and they’re going to have three rounds. The two “power types” were the anchors for their teams.

This game doesn’t require any explanation . . .

. . . and it was over pretty quickly.

Next was an abridged triathlon relay – swimming, bicycling, then running (except the running would be done in flippers).

The teams each had to decide which three members would compete – one in each leg of the relay.

I’m not sure how team white came to their decision, but the red team did janken.

The swimmers were Hokuto-kun and Shintaro-kun – a good match-up. The bikers were Juri-kun and Taiga-kun – another Bakaleya battle. The runners were Genki-kun and Genta-kun – also good.

But there’s a trouble with relay races – even if the individual pairings are good, we might not even get the match-up if one of the first team members flubs it early in the race.

I’m trying my best to not give too much away about how things turned out, but Hokuto-kun clearly doesn’t spend much time at the beach, given the advice he gave Taiga-kun. Watching Genki-kun running in those flippers was the absolute highlight, and Genta-kun did his run with good spirit, too.

With the end of that competition, we got to the final fight, which was titled “cavalry battle on the water”. It involved Takahashi Kaito-kun and Iwahahsi Genki-kun . . .

. . . being held up by the other four members of their respective teams, who were waist-deep in the water.

And they were each trying to grab the other’s cap. However, it was unclear knocking the cap off was sufficient or if actually retaining possession of it was required. They went to a video review and decided to go with a rematch.

This ended up a rather haphazard deciding match between the two teams. Yasui-kun seemed bemused throughout the whole thing.

The winning team got to eat (of course), and I can’t offer any screencaps of that without revealing who won, so let’s turn to the next thing in the show, which was another installment of Matsumura Hokuto-kun’s corner in which he eats:

I’m sure someone out there is very impressed with this.

Someday, I’m going to see a talent on Japanese TV actually saying the meal is total crap and explaining why – Gordon Ramsay-style. Someday.

There’s more, though. We get the start of a lengthier challenge with these guys:

Among those who have already been on Gamushara were Jesse, Yasui, Matsukura Kaito, and Nakamura Reia. I don’t remember seeing Miyachika Kaito-kun or Abe Aran-kun, and I certainly haven’t seen Vasayegha Hikaru-kun. I’m especially interested to see what the three newcomers do with this opportunity.

Last time I saw Vasayegha-kun, he was introduced as part of Twenty Twenty and much shorter.

Their challenge – sports sword play! Yay! Not with real swords, of course, but with practice foam swords. That’s even better than wooden swords because the juniors aren’t going to hesitate from whacking one another with them.

We will get more of that in the next episode.

To close, we got some “Crazy Accel” during the credits.

This was an okay episode, but I felt let down by the battle segment. Not sure why, since there were hilarious aspects to all the fights, and I thought that the effort from the juniors was pretty solid. Maybe I just set my expectations too high or, more probably, I felt it was over too fast. I think it would have been better if they had just devoted the episode to the competition and added two more battles to the list.

I’m very much looking forward to the next episode, though. It’s nice to finally have a new batch of juniors involved in the show, and the challenge looks like it’s going to be a blast. I’m wondering if this is the monthly challenge, though – will we be seeing some sword fighting on the J’s Party stage with these seven juniors featured, or will there be a different challenge coming up to fill that slot?